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Planning a Wedding When a Parent Is Ill

When my mom was told she had Stage 4 lung cancer last November, I waded into uncharted territory. I was 28, living with my partner of five years, Dan, and our two dogs in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. As soon as my mom broke the news, from her home in Florida, I rushed down to be with her.

“I’m bringing my mom up to New York for treatment. She’s going to stay with us for a while,” I told Dan over the phone.

Dan agreed immediately, no questions asked. At that moment he could detect the urgency in my voice. All my life I’ve felt like a duck in water — paddling furiously beneath the surface while maintaining a calm demeanor.

My mom took up residence in the bedroom in Brooklyn I shared with Dan. We moved to the pullout couch in our living room. Our relationship had survived life on two continents, including months spent living in very cramped spaces. But we weren’t prepared for the demands of caring for someone with cancer.

In the worst of times, when my mom was a regular in the emergency room, Dan made sure our life went on. Our dogs, Cody and Wolfie, were tended to, and dinner was waiting many nights when I came home exhausted. When my cool facade broke under the heavy weight of emotion, he was there to give me support. By the time my mom moved out of our apartment, two and a half months later, our relationship was stronger.

Dan and I had discussed marriage before, but it was always in general terms, never with a date in mind. I had always assumed that if one of our parents became ill, we would put marriage aside until he or she got better. There was no reason to hurry.

But advanced-stage cancer is unpredictable. My mom might go into remission for a time, but she will never fully be cured. Even so, her last few CT scans showed no progression of her cancer, and she was back to her day-to-day life in Florida. We seized on her relative good health and headed off to the Dominican Republic for a vacation.

There, a day after my 29th birthday, Dan proposed. The hotel had a spotty Wi-Fi connection and no cellphone reception, and we had a few blissful days to ourselves before announcing the news to family and friends. When my mom heard about our engagement, she whooped with joy.

We sputtered our way into the planning process. I wanted to skip over to City Hall in a few weeks time and have a quiet dinner with our families. Dan wanted to take time and plan a real wedding. “Time is not on our side,” I kept reminding him, my mom’s illness hanging over my head. How could we be sure my mom would still feel good months from now?

There were few places to turn for guidance. Then I remembered leafing through a book months earlier that had been sitting on a colleague’s desk at work, called “A Practical Wedding.” In a section entitled “Planning a Wedding When Life Hurts,” the author, Meg Keene, tells brides and grooms with terminally ill parents not to cancel their nuptials — even in the event of death. “The number-one piece of advice I’ve received from every single bride dealing with pain while wedding planning is: have a wedding. The power of bringing people together in joy, particularly in a time of sorrow, is power that cannot be underestimated,” she wrote.

We decided on a four-month engagement and a fall wedding. Finding someone who could put together the event quickly was easy: my brother Joey, who lives in Savannah, is a wedding planner. I asked him what would happen if our mom’s condition went downhill. “I can put a wedding together in three weeks if I need to,” he assured me. And Savannah, Ga., with its temperate climate and proximity to my mom’s home in Florida, seemed the perfect place for a fall event.

Planning a wedding in the midst of illness is bittersweet. My mom, Joey and I considered the realities: My mom was receiving chemo every three weeks. The chemo left her constantly fatigued and destroyed the white blood cells that fight infection. Neulasta, the drug that helps her body produce white blood cells, causes excruciating pain in her bones. She consulted her doctor and made contingency plans in case her immune system crashed. We looked at the calendar and made note of her good days, usually a week after receiving chemo. We left gaps in the itinerary for the weekend so that she could rest between activities.

And we proceeded cautiously. My mom wanted to come wedding dress shopping with me in New York, but that would mean boarding a plane with a compromised immune system. A few days before my appointment at the dress shop, she was given her doctor’s blessing and a shot to boost her white blood cell count. We went home with a lovely off-white number and new memories to put in the safe.

Until the big day arrives, my mom continues her weekly regimen of blood tests, shots and chemo, but now she gushes with the nurses over wedding plans. She predicts that she won’t be able to sleep as the day gets closer — and not because of steroids, but because of excitement.

And what day did we choose for our wedding? That part was easy — because of the lack of available options. The venue had only one date that worked with our calendar — Halloween — when tradition begs us to laugh in the face of death. Needless to say, we grabbed it.